


The Lost Son

by Calyps0



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: A Kiss, Angst, Brief mention of romance, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming of Age, Gen, Jedi, Jedi Training, Lightsaber Training, Lightsabers, Loss of Identity, Loss of Innocence, Lost Love, Mostly Canon Compliant, Original Characters - Freeform, Original work - Freeform, Self-Discovery, Star Wars - Freeform, Trilogy, What i would write if i had my own trilogy, also moodboards, angsty, but a hopeful one?, droid, gray jedi kinda, holos, im still salty about TROS, lots of notes at the end, myrkr, not quite a happy ending, read if you want to understand some of the inspiration for the story, ysalamiri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:00:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 14,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22992103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0
Summary: Can you teach me how to do that?” he asks this woman—his new Master.“Some day,” she says, in that same strange, resonant voice, and though the mask still hides her mouth the glimmer in her eyes looks as if she might be smiling.“Some day.”---This fic represents what I would write if had the opportunity to make my own Star Wars trilogy. Lucasfilm, hit me up if you ever run out of ideas.Notes/research are at the end.Obligatory disclaimer: I own nothing. All mistakes/inconsistencies are my own. :)





	1. Chapter 1

**\---**

**The Lost Son**

**\---**

_My name is—_

_To be honest, I don’t really remember my name. Or who I used to be. The name I was born with died a long time ago, back before my village burned, back before I forgot the scent of linen on my mother’s skirts._

_But I call myself Fray because that’s the sound the wind used to make when it whistled through the grass on my home world. Fray like torn fabric, fray like things that need to be mended._

_I found it fitting._

_I was born on Myrkr in a small farming village called Kalros—the place of silence. It’s a strange name, really. There was always noise when I lived there—my family, the workers, the sounds of harvesting, the tinny suck of rice paddies, like drains being swirled into the center of the earth._

_But maybe it was silence in the sense that it was separate from conflicts in the galaxy I thought would never come to us._

_The conflicts between something called a Jedi, and something called a Sith. That’s why it was so quiet._

_Because Kalros has never seen either one._

\---

A freighter whooshes overhead, repulsorlifts spraying steam in silvery lilting whorls. Its filmy-soft shadow blots out the sky.

Workers in a field of long groping stalks look up as the resulting breeze washes overhead. Their bodies are bent over the rice paddy, swampy and rainforest-fresh. Tangled into green stems under gray sky—like a prairie before rainfall—are orange-bright lizards, furry with pebbled feet that stick fast to glossy leaves, or else slither underfoot through prosaic marshland. They make flitting _croak_ noises, slick eyelids blinking sideways across glassy-bright pupils. The ground is damp and soft. It is the wet season, and workers’ boots are already sinking into the bog.

Under this washed-out sky, between spindled roots, a boy is playing—unsuccessfully maintaining the guise of helping his mother with this year’s crop. He is twelve years old, slight, hard-jawed. Hair the careworn color of unstained ochre-wood.

One of those sun-golden lizards darts near his booted foot. He chases it, fingers fumbling in the wet grass, when the ship soars overhead, striking out all sound.

Rain starts to fall. It tangles in his eyelashes, around his ears, sluices down his cheeks like fresh tears. He looks toward the cruiser, loses sight of the lizard.

“Come here!”

His mother is shouting, calling his name—one he has always _hated_ —but he ignores her, chases after his quarry instead.

The ship’s ramp descends. Two figures walk out, blurred by afternoon light and the shadow of riveted metal: a tall human woman with dark hair and an intimidating lower face mask, and a blond humanoid boy, not much older than the child still grinning between fleeting flashes of orange scales. Both strangers are dressed in long, flowing robes, though the blond boy’s are a silvery dove-gray, while the woman’s are a somber charcoal-black.

All noise stops: scythes cease cutting, stems drop to the damp ground. The gentle slosh of raindrops on the surface of the bog patters away into a warbling whisper.

The pair steps forward, boots squishing, until they are within sightlines of the small boy whose triumphant hands are at last clutched around the furry-bright amphibian. When their shadow stains his vision, he looks up. In his distraction, the lizard darts out of his grasp, slithering happily away—a star-bright blur.

“We’ve been looking for you!” the blond boy says without preamble, sporting a grin wide as the horizon.

\---

“I’m Baghiri,” the blond boy offers, after they are settled inside and tea is brewing, milk-sweet, in the kettle on the stove. His skin is so pale it is almost blue, and tiny, rounded antennae dot his temples. “But you can call me Ri. This is Master Aashalata.” He gestures to the cross-armed woman with honey-brown skin and blue-black hair, who has elected to stand rather than sit.

She has also chosen to keep her mask on; it is a steel-colored thing, pointed to make her look as if she has a snout. Painted on the surface is the snarl of some fanged beast, all sharp white teeth and wide red lips.

The lizard-boy stares. The fanged woman and his mother disappeared together for a worryingly long while, but now he and the visitors are sitting at a low table together and his mother is at the stove in the next room. Pomegranate scents the air, fruity and light.

Baghiri continues proudly, as if this is normal, everyday fare, “She’s a Jedi. I’m going to be one, too. I’m going to build my own lightsaber and fight bad guys and help the galaxy.” He says this all in one breath, as children are wont to do, as if he is afraid that if he does not use all his words he will lose them to the open air like balloons. The lizard-boy imagines this for a while: bright red balloons spiraling into the gray atmosphere, their elastic skins bubbled by water droplets. He waves the image away.

He realizes belatedly he should introduce himself—after all, it is only polite to offer your name when another is given—but he changes his mind at the last second. His mother is still brewing tea, out of earshot.

“I’m—Fray,” he says, even though this is not his real name and never will be. But he hears the rustling whisper of the reeds at night, the gentle sloshing of the paddy after it has been freshly irrigated, and this name is like that: soft as a sigh. He likes the way it sounds in his mouth.

“Nice to meet you, Fray,” Ri says, extending a sweaty, slim-fingered hand. The lizard-boy—now called _Fray—_ reaches across the table to take it.

Ri pulls away at the last second.

“Got ya!” he says, face pulled into a smirk. “Ash taught me that one,” he points out, jerking a thumb back toward his master.

Fray snorts. There aren’t many boys his age around Kalros to play with. Or Myrkr, for that matter. He thinks he would like Ri, given the chance—all careless, gap-toothed smile and sun-burned skin. But Fray’s curiosity gets the better of him, and his mind whirs back like silent gears to all that this _Ri_ has revealed.

“I never seen a Jedi before,” Fray admits. He shifts an uneasy glance at the woman. “I didn’t think they wore so much black, though.”

The woman quirks an eyebrow but does not dignify this with a response. Fray feels as if he should be afraid of her, but for some reason cannot bully himself into it. He’s about to ask the boy why they’ve come, in a _spaceship_ no less, but something flickers, crawling up his spine. He shifts as coiled fur pulses against his neck.

Ringed around his shoulders—like a little typeset curlicue—is the furry orange lizard, snoring softly. Fray looks back at the blond boy—Ri, he reminds himself—who he is surprised to find frozen in his seat.

“Master, look, see what he’s got?” Ri whispers to the tall woman in a much more urgent tone than Fray finds distinctly necessary.

The woman’s— _Master_ _Aashalata’s_ —thick eyebrows raise. The sight sends a shiver down Fray’s spine, tawny hair standing up at the nape of his neck. Dressed like a wraith, she does not look like the kind of person to be easily spooked.

“What do we do?” Ri asks her, oblivious to Fray’s musings.

She gives Ri a look and a gesture that clearly says, _I’m not going near that thing,_ the furrows of her brow turned down in distaste. Fray frowns. She has yet to speak a single word, and that is more than a little curious, but he does not comment.

Fray thinks suddenly that he must have been rude. “This is Kip,” he says, tickling the little lizard’s chin, who in turn blinks congenially across the wooden table.

“Get it away from here!” shrieks Ri.

Fray makes a face; his cheeks tinge with pink. “What for?”

He gets a shocked look in response from the bleach-haired boy. “That’s a ysalamir! Don’t you know what it does?”

Fray shrugs. “Kip doesn’t _‘do’_ anything. He’s my friend.”

But at Ri’s tone, Fray pauses for a moment. These _are_ Jedi, aren’t they? Yes, Ri hadn’t been lying—Fray can spot the glint of silver at the tall woman’s hip when she shifts in the slatted afternoon sun. Her black clothes concern him, as does the fearsome mask, but there is a strange softness to her eyes that bely the dangerous guise. Both of them, even the blond boy, carry themselves with a sort of guarded poise, a strange calm that straightens their spines, steadies the set of their shoulders.

It’s odd though. Fray can’t understand why a Jedi—someone with nearly limitless power—would be afraid of a tiny lizard.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asks again. “You don’t have any of ‘em back where you’re from? We have loads.”

“There are…more?” Ri asks in a horrified whisper, fingers now all but covering his eyes.

“Oh yeah,” Fray says amiably, “They get all over the leaves and everything, chomping up the crickets, make things real difficult when it’s time to harvest. Not sure what to do with ‘em, to be quite honest.”

He pauses to clap gentle fingers over his lizard’s ears. In falsetto, whispers: “Don’t taste too good, you see.”

Two pairs of eyebrows disappear into hairlines: Ri and Master Aashalata’s faces spike into identical shocked expressions.

“Get it out of here!” says Ri again.

“Why should I?”

“Because it’s dangerous! It can—”

His master flexes out a swift hand; the movement is startling from her perch in the corner. Baghiri falls immediately silent. She nods at him once, and he nods back, knowingly. Fray’s brow curls at this exchange.

His mother is still making tea.

Ri swallows, rubs the back of his neck. The gesture seems inevitable, like an intake of breath. “Anyway,” he says, after scooting his chair back a polite yet noticeable distance, “that’s kinda…beside the point. What we really want is to know if you wanted to…come with us, you see.”

Fray raises his eyebrows. He has been ‘ _Fray_ ’ for about four minutes now and already _Jedi_ are asking him to come explore the galaxy with them.

He should have changed his name sooner. 

But he savors the moment instead, fiddles with the edge of his sleeve. Then, after a healthy silence, decides: “Alright. Will we be home by dinner?”

A snort bubbles up from Ri’s wide mouth. “It takes longer than that to learn how to use the _force!”_

This last word is spoken with a quiet reverence. Fray registers its impact in the air.

“The force?”

“Yeah, the force, only the thing that binds the universe together!”

Fray nods, though this is the first time he has ever heard of such a thing. He knows about the Jedi, of course. He’s seen holos of the powerful knights, broad and strong and wielding sabers brighter than Myrkr’s moon.

Ri continues, “Our sensors detected high levels of the force here on this planet, even though there was a lot of static and disturbance—it kept appearing and disappearing. But we locked onto it at the end. The coordinates led us here. To you.” Ri shifts in his seat, almost imperceptibly, as he says this, and Fray gets the distinct impression that this is not the full story. However, he is much more interested in this whole _force_ idea to ask.

“So you think I can be a Jedi?” he leans forward in his seat. He feels suddenly as if he and this Ri are coconspirators in something greater than themselves.

“Why not?” Ri shrugs, “I’ll be one, too.”

Ri mimes igniting a lightsaber, making a vibrating noise between his back teeth.

Fray snickers. He wants to go with these _Jedi_ suddenly, wants to run away until the gentle slosh of the marsh becomes an ocean, fly until the gray of the sky dissipates into stars.

_Except—_

“Have you talked to my mom?” he can’t help but ask.

Ri nods. “She understands the power that you have. The potential. But it’s up to you. Whether you want to come or not.”

Fray thinks for a moment. Then he extends his hand again, fingers splayed like bird wings. This time, Ri takes it.

\---

“You are _not_ bringing that thing with us.”

“Yes, I am.”

 _“No_ , you’re not. Master, tell him!”

Aashalata shakes her head once, an unshakeable ‘ _no_.’

They are standing outside the rice paddy, the scent of fresh rainfall sharp all around them. Fray and Ri are arguing about Kip, whose spindly orange tail is twined around Fray’s fingertips. A packed bag sits slumped between their feet.

“I’ll take care of him while you’re gone,” Fray’s mother assures him. “We’ll both be waiting for you when you get back.” She smiles, and it is tinged at the edges with some indecipherable emotion that Fray cannot for the life of him parse.

“A year of training, you see,” Ri is saying, unconscious of this exchange. “Then we’ll bring you back. After that, you can decide if you want to continue on the Jedi path or not.”

Fray nods, unsticking Kip from the underside of his elbow and leveling a stare into the lizard’s marble-irised face. “Ok, buddy,” he says to the creature, “you take care of ma, you hear? I don’t want to hear about you getting into any trouble.”

With that, he drops the lizard into his mother’s outstretched palm. Kip shoots him a reproachful look and skitters up to settle at her collarbone like a choker.

“You’ll write, won’t you?” his mother asks, a hint of amusement glancing the corner of her mouth.

Fray rolls his eyes. “I don’t know how to, ma. You know that.”

“You could learn.”

“I’ll try.”

She smiles. “Send me a blank letter, then. So I know you’re alright.”

“Ok.”

He hugs her half-heartedly, and she smells like she always has—linen and rice paddies and pomegranate tea. In this moment, Fray is a little bit angry with her. There are people with powers, the _Jedi_ are real. They are here to take him to someplace greater, to teach him things he has only ever seen in his dreams.

But she has never told him any of this. If they had not come, would she have hidden this knowledge from him forever? Would he have wasted away in the fields, never knowing that his destiny was sitting there waiting for him, whispering, _come find me?_

For this reason, he does not look at her when he says goodbye. He leaves with the two figures, one tall and one short, as they step into the ship, as it sails, arcing high into the atmosphere. He does not spare a glance as his mother waves, a shadowed figure out there on the sea of green and orange, huddled in a cloak under the rain-gray sky. Kip blinks from her shoulder with a solemn _slick_ of one eyelid, but still Fray does not look, treating this choice with the stubbornness of some scripture figure in danger of turning into stone.

He will regret this, he knows. But for now he does not care. For now he is twelve years old, he is going on a spaceship, and he is going to become a Jedi.

\---

This is a first, for Fray. His first time off-planet, his first time in a spaceship of any kind.

His first day going by this new name, the first day of what feels like the rest of his life.

Things will never be the same, he knows. Things will be far grander.

When he presses his fingertips to the cool glass of the viewport, the shape of his small planet blinks like some watery snow globe, wet like a marble, glassy and feathered inside. The feeling swoops up inside his belly, makes him feel giddy and lighter than air. He knows logically that there must be gravity emulators within the compact glider, but feels for a moment as lightheaded as if he was floating upside down. The strange sensation glimmers in his fingertips, his toes, settles in his chest like brambles on his heartstrings.

 _Is this the force_ , he wonders?

He has the feeling he will soon find out.

\---

Master Aashalata does not say a word until they reach the black. When she does, it rings with some peculiar, reverberating quality. She instructs Ri to go fetch some supplies, and he ducks into the back corridor, antennae bobbing, while she settles into the pilot’s chair. The instruction is vaguely-shaped enough that Fray isn’t quite sure he’s heard it.

When Ri returns, she gives the blond boy a knowing look. “ _Strange boy, isn’t he? The lizard’s friend.”_

This time Fray knows he heard that. “How are you doing that?” he levels at her.

The woman raises her eyebrows again, impressed.

“Master Aashalata has telepathic powers,” Ri answers for her. “She can talk right into your head.”

Fray’s lips part in surprise.

He hadn’t been scared, when he was on Myrkr. He was ready to show these Jedi his true potential, ready to gain true power. But now he wonders, and for the first time he is just a little bit afraid.

_What has he gotten himself into?_

Soon enough, though, his bravery takes over. “Can you teach me how to do that?” he asks this woman—his new Master.

 _“Some day,”_ she says, in that same strange, resonant voice, and though the mask still hides her mouth the glimmer in her eyes looks as if she might be smiling. “ _Some day.”_

\---

That night Fray stumbles back toward the bunks, emotionally exhausted, and without looking he runs into a little rumbling bot—no higher than his shins. It is a squat thing, with a cone-shaped head and purple-glass paneling.

“Who’re you?” he asks, dropping to his knee in front of it.

“TI-84,” the little bot beeps primly.

“We rescued Tee-eye from a shipwreck a few months ago,” Ri explains from his perch on his own bunk. “She’s a whiz with calculations. Ask her anything.”

Fray looks up. He’d been so tired he hadn’t even realized Ri was sprawled there.

Fray thinks for a moment. He’s not so good with math—he can’t think of any calculation he wouldn’t be impressed with.

“How many grains of rice are in a bog?” he asks, hoping to stump the little bot.

Tee-eye beeps happily, “Enough for dinner.”

Fray grins. And though he feels far from home, he thinks now that he’s made the right choice.

He climbs into bed, pulling soft gray sheets over himself, and slips his eyes shut.

\---

That night, stars glitter like pearls in iridescent, oil-spill black. Space is silent as a vacuum, cold as ice-tips, eternal as the soul.

And this is how Fray—a rice-farmer, born in the village of Kalros on the planet Myrkr—meets Master Aashalata and her apprentice, Baghiri.

This is how he starts his Jedi journey.


	2. Chapter 2

_His name is Baghiri. I call him Ri. Ri like the lilt of a songbird, trilling in those jungle forests I left behind._

_Ri is from a planet called Jedha, and he was abandoned by his parents in a mine when he was eight years old. He spent two days alone underground, until he was able to crawl his way out. He’s most comfortable outdoors and in sunlight, and sometimes he still has trouble with dark, enclosed spaces._

_I fell into the deep end of the bog on Myrkr once. I know the feeling._

_Master Aashalata is harder to understand. She keeps telling me to call her Ash, but I sometimes wonder why a woman who wears the mask of a hunter wants to be called what the dead become._

_I don’t know where she’s from, or how she came to be a Jedi. She hasn’t revealed much yet—not her history or her voice or even the lower half of her face._

_Not even Ri has seen her take the mask off. He thinks she might be hiding vampire fangs._

_I’m not certain I can discount that theory._

_I’m Fray, of course. Fray from the rice fields of Kalros, Fray like a tear, Fray like the power that I am going to learn how to sharpen like the point of a star. It feels new. It feels like me._

_When I think about the three of us—about those names we have taken for ourselves, a trinity of falsities—it makes me smile. Perhaps this is all we were ever meant to be:_

_The makers of our own destinies._

_\---_

When Fray sleeps—on the bunk below Ri, because the blond boy feels too enclosed on the lower level—it is curled into an arc, with a hollow in his arms the shape of something that a small and furry creature might burrow into.

 _(Kip,_ like something safe, like something to hide beneath—a home.)

He is grateful for Ri’s presence; he used to sleep on a shared mattress with his mother back on Kalros, and listening to the lilts of Ri’s breathing helps him even his own out, too. Fray dreams, fitful, along the strings of stars, as the ship jumps—higher and farther, ever farther.

But even then, something invades his mind. A voice, perhaps? And then another asking: _do you hear that?_

He startles awake. There is no one speaking those phantom words. Just as he falls back into a half-remembered slumber, it sounds again.

_Well, Fray? Do you hear that?_

\---

One moonlit evening, while the ship sails through skeins of galaxies and the stars dissolve into dotted lines through frosted transparisteel, Ri tells Fray about Master Ash.

They haven’t reached their first destination, yet. Fray has never been in a spaceship, let alone on a trip this long and he is starting to go a bit stir-crazy. Master Aashalata has left them alone for the evening to take inventory of their supplies. They’ll have to stop and restock, soon.

Fray has been gone from his home for approximately three days. In the last half-hour alone he has paced his way across the ship’s small kitchen corner thirty-eight times. Tee-eye has followed him fretfully, emitting short, shrill beeps of concern.

He’s thought about his mother twelve times, the rice paddy eight, Kip sixteen.

But not once has he considered going back.

Even so, his patience is wearing thin.

And Ri, concerned the kitchen’s flooring might be doing the same, takes pity on him and decides to distract him with a story.

“Master Ash can see the future,” he says, as nonchalantly as if he were commenting on the weather.

Fray falls into the seat across him, nearly tripping over Tee-eye for the fourth time tonight. He apologizes to the bot even as he raises one skeptical eyebrow. “You’re kidding.”

Ri gives him a crooked grin. “Well, maybe not the future, exactly, but she gets these, visions, you know? Little glimpses of events and stuff that might come true.” His hands spread out on the little table in the back of the ship, pale palms open so Fray can trace his heartline with his eyes.

“That’s how we found you,” Ri continues. “She saw it. The coordinates. But when we got to your planet—”

“Myrkr,” Fray interjects.

“Yeah, when we got to Myrkr—it was like there was nothing there at all. Lucky we ran right into you. It’s pretty weird though, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Fray has to admit. “Pretty weird.”

He wonders, though. That is a strange coincidence. _First telepathy, then fortune telling? Is this like that deep bog he slipped into and below, like an endless rabbit hole? Has he fallen into a trap?_

And this, of course, makes him wonder most about Master Ash, who he is starting to suspect is not really a Jedi at all. He finally works up the courage to ask, whispering to the blond boy, whose hair is so fine it is nearly translucent, “Is she a…” he shudders to say the word, because as he knows about the Jedi, he also knows about the—

“ _Sith?”_

An amused curve springs to pink-blossom lips. Ri replies loudly, “You know, you don’t have to whisper. She can hear you anyway.”

Fray concedes this point.

“No, she’s not a Sith,” Ri answers affably. “But there’s…kind of a fine between Sith and Jedi, if you think about it. See, you kind of have to let the light and dark work together. Balance, and all that.” Ri’s eyes are wide and glassy, and he uses his arms to gesture at something beyond the two of them. “That’s what the force is. It’s all balance, you know?”

Fray doesn’t know. He’s not equipped to understand what shade of light the power in his veins takes the shape of. He doesn’t know what kind of energy pulses through his fingertips, makes him as dizzy as if he has climbed alongside gathering storms. Up in the air now, it bubbles inside of him, like fizz and lightning strikes.

“Show me,” he says, instead.

Ri grins.

\---

White fingers curl around something soft and silvery. Ri has pulled a feather out from a little trinket box he keeps by their bunks in the back of the ship.

“So,” he says, “you have to focus on the air above and _around_ the feather, on its connection not only with you, but also with the world around it.” He nods once, decisively, as if he is proud of this explanation.

Fray nods, too, because this seems like the right thing to do.

But Ri is not paying attention. He is focused only on the soft feather in his hand, going nearly cross-eyed with the effort. With a look of stern concentration, he watches as the feather lifts about a half-inch from the palm of his hand, where it hovers for less than ten seconds.

Fray is _entranced._

“That’s insane!”

Ri laughs, delighted. The feather falls to the table. “You think that’s cool? Watch _this.”_ His grin curves even wider. “Hey, Ash,” he calls.

Soft-footed steps on steel flooring. Master Aashalata pokes her head through the archway, a datapad in her hands, her thick hair pulled back into a sloppy chignon. A few strands are coming loose, and when she steps into the light it is like her head is covered in a dark halo.

“Do you need any help with the inventory?” Ri asks idly. “I know I messed up our count last time but I really think—”

As he speaks, Ri accidentally-on-purpose slides a glass of water off the table they’re sitting at. Without hesitation, Ash reaches a lazy hand out and it—

Freezes. In mid-air—liquid and all.

Ash levels a stare at the two wide-eyed boys. Her voice resounds in the small cabin.

“ _No, I don’t need any help. And you are not subtle, you know that?”_

She lets the glass fall to the floor. It does not break, but water spills everywhere, splattering their feet. Tee-eye squeals and backs out of the way.

“ _You’re cleaning that up,”_ intones Ash.

Ri laughs at Fray’s expression as her footsteps fade toward the rear of the ship.

He reaches for a mop.

“Told ya.”

\---

They stock up for supplies at the next trade outpost, a busy cluttered place with hundreds of stalls and open markets.

Fray stares up at everything—he never knew buildings could be this _tall—_ and nearly gets lost in the crowd. He is suddenly immensely alone, on a planet with only strangers as his traveling partners. For one star-sharp second he misses his mother more than he can bear—more than he misses Kip, even.

_Why hadn’t he looked back?_

But Master Aashalata’s— _Ash’s_ —hand encircles his wrist, and soon his is being led gently but steadily back to the cruiser.

They take in the night lights, the sound of a different planet, the culture, the people, from the ship’s roof. Tee-eye projects the tangentials between constellations, painting pictures in the stippled sky. Everything is brighter than life, sharper than taste, more colorful than touch.

_(Do you hear that, Fray?)_

His regret melts away on the wind.

\---

True to his promise, Fray does eventually learn how to write. It is clumsy at first, but he picks it up soon enough. There is power in this, in the ways he shapes his letters, forms them onto crisp paper, makes them his own.

He writes his ‘ _o_ ’s counterclockwise, thank you very much. And when he concentrates deeply, a little line appears at the furrow of his brow.

So instead of a blank piece of paper, he is able to send his mother a short note, about a month into their journey. He has spent his days attending to the ship, learning how to refuel, eating rations, traveling to different planets.

And meditating. Lots of meditating. Ash explains that he has to connect himself to the force first _before_ he can begin manipulating anything that it is connected to.

 _“Everything is balance,”_ she says.

Fray can’t sit still well enough at all, but he tries for her sake.

 _You promised me power,_ he thinks. _If I have to earn it, so be it._

So with Ash’s help, he details in crude writing the plants and animals he has seen, the places he has been, the things he has experienced.

However, he does not write about the things he is able to do, not yet. He does not write about the cup he saw stop in midair, or the feather floating above Ri’s outstretched palm. He does not write about the power he feels pulsing through his fingertips, or Ash’s voice lilting softly into his brain.

When he tells his mother about his power, he wants it to be truly impressive.

So he waits. He finishes the letter with a drawing instead, a crude charcoal impression of him and Ri in the ship, the shadow of Ash in the background, holding a datapad in her hands.

He drops it at an outpost, and the attendant droid picks it up with a brisk nod.

It is the last letter he ever sends.

\---

Kalros burns, after that. Fray finds out, two months after he is gone, reads on Ash’s datapad an account of the attack on Myrkr from another planet in the system. It is over food, resources, water—a war he doesn’t understand. He has never had to fight anyone to have enough food to eat.

He does not send his mother another letter because he does not want to risk it being returned to him. He does not want confirmation that she is dead.

 _It is better this way,_ he tells himself. Knowing and not knowing. Alive and dead.

Of course, he knows Ash can divine the truth easily enough. He does not ask.

A small part of him—the part he wants to hate but cannot—is almost glad. Now he has an excuse. Now he does not have to leave the Jedi when the year is up.

Now he can be all he ever wanted to be, and more.

The other part of him—the part that is small—learns quickly the taste of tears on his pillowcase, grasps onto the memory of his mother and the scent of linen, and the rice fields, and the memory of Kip and the other lizards— _salamaru_ , he thinks Ri called them. This small part of him weeps at night for home, wishes to run up to Ash with quivering chin and beg her to take him home.

_(Do you hear that?)_

He tamps this part down. He does not ask. She does not tell. 

\---

Ash speaks to him that night and instead tells him about something called _samsara_ , the cosmic truth she believes in. It postulates that life is an endless cycle, that people are suspended in a seesawing balance where life and death exist in the same instant at the same time.

Fray tells her about the rice fields, about the cycles of irrigation and drainage, about letting the land aerate so it can keep producing crops. She says this is the same thing, that water sustains life as much as it takes away.

Wet, dry. Alive, dead.

The cycle goes on.


	3. Chapter 3

_Forgive me, mother, but I will be strong, now. Stronger than you would have ever let me be._

\---

And so this is the shape their days take:

They spend their days jumping to various planets, whichever ones Master Ash gets glancing visions of. She speaks a word to neither of them, choosing instead to drop thoughts into both their heads like some wry, echo-voiced imaginary friend. Fray is used to this by now. After all, it has been almost six months since he first left home. 

He has still never seen Ash without her mask. She does not take her mealtimes with him or Ri, and when she drinks from her water canteen she slips a titanium straw underneath the painted metal. Fray knows well enough by now not to comment.

But she does not remain aloof; rather, she has wit and humor, and Fray finds himself settling into their back-and-forth comfortably enough, with time. He learns some rudimentary math skills from Tee-eye, and she shows him more constellations at each place they visit, teaching him about the various planets and moons.

It is routine, as routine as space travel and Jedi powers and telepathic masters can be.

It is like the rice fields, like _samsara_ , irrigation and drainage—both life and death.

\---

One long, sodden afternoon, they return from a trip to some humid, volcanic planet. The trio (plus one reluctant heat-avoidant bot) had stepped onto glass-smooth rock, igneous and dark, and Ash had meditated for three days in complete silence. Whatever she had seen had shaken her, but unlike most of her other visions—which she usually explains to the two boys, framing them as lessons—she does not share this one.

The leave the swirling red planet behind. It pulses as if with life, even as they watch it fade from their navigation screen. There is a sort of strange energy to it—ethereal and haunting. Fray considers staying there, meditating until he, too, has gained this expansive, evasive knowledge.

But Ri pulls him away by the elbow, leading him to the cockpit to show him some of the more arcane controls. When Fray remembers to blink, the red planet is gone.

\---

So on they go. Forests, ice planets, long, swooping deserts. On ocean shores, pebble-bright. Across jungles and under crystalline fog.

And on the way Ash has Tee-eye record holos, little messages for the future, filled with what they have encountered and learned. Fray and Ri learn how to access these, and sometimes input their own ideas and observations. They meditate and they travel, and soon enough—when they reach a place that has a good environment for it—Ash allows them to start training with little wooden staves.

The weeks stretch into months. There is not so much a curriculum as there is learning by experience, working by hand, discovering and exploring. Fray has excelled at sparring, managing to beat Ri most days and even Ash a few times, though he suspects she might be going easy on him when he does.

The further from home he travels he can feel his connection to the force grow stronger. Every day he spends honing his power, cultivating it until it is a strong, sharp thing.

He thinks he might have more power than he thought. He thinks this might be the best thing to happen to him.

He thinks he might make something of himself yet.

\---

As quick as lightning, the year is up.

Fray knows up to the millisecond when this occurs. Master Ash knows, too, of course, but she also knows that Fray does not wish to go back to Kalros. He is content with his choice, feels as if he can reach his full potential here.

There is fear, too. Fear of the unknown, fear that he will go back and his mother will be long dead. This is a kind of denial, she realizes, but it is one he needs to work through on his own.

( _Do you hear—)_

So she does not acknowledge the day. Neither does he. 

They continue leaping among the stars.


	4. Chapter 4

_A Jedi’s power, Ash says, is as a peacekeeper. A policing force in the galaxy, someone who avoids conflict, who solves problems, who works toward the betterment of all sentient life._

_But I wonder, if that is so, why then are they known for their sabers?_

_\---_

Fray is fourteen—two years out from Kalros—the first time he sees a man die.

Ash has taken him and Ri to a small trading village she had glimpsed in a lavender-tinged dream. She said she had heard a calling there, and felt it would make an important lesson.

But as soon as they arrive their ship is ambushed by pirates—they had seen the cruiser’s rusted pigment and mistaken it for a rival gang’s colors.

“Get down!” Master Aashalata screams, as the plasma of blaster fire sears the air.

But Fray is not quick enough, yet. He has not yet honed his body or reflexes into sharp enough, dangerous enough things. And so he does not see the arm that sweeps his legs under him, the hands that pin his shoulders to the ground. Within the space of a blink the pirate’s blaster is right next to his face, a finger tightening on the trigger.

And Fray freezes.

It is then that Ash’s saber ignites, spearing through the pirate’s chest like a stream of frost.

This is the first time Fray has seen the blade: it shines diamond-white, no color at all.

\---

As a child Fray had been prone to frequent nosebleeds.

Even now, when the air was particularly dry he would get them, the feel of liquid slick and warm in his throat. He would wake in the middle of the night and find his upper lip caked in blood dried like red clay.

There is blood on him now, all over him, so thick and clotted in places it is almost black, but this time it is not his own.

The resulting fight had been brutal and vicious, blasters soaring next to his ears, Ash’s saber igniting the lilac air, bodies falling to the ground like snowdrops.

And yet he is safe—uninjured, thanks to Master Ash and even a little bit of fancy force-work by Ri.

Blood stains his hands, but not his soul.

Not yet.

_Fray, do you—_

He does. He hears.

This death changes him, as it is the first. But just as he knows the shape of his heartbeat, or the sound of the rice paddies at night, he also knows that it is not the last.

\---

“Do you ever think about going back?” Ri asks him, that quiet sundown. Fray sits fiddling with the hem of his shirt, now tattered from the embers that had scored the air. Fray thinks that someone else might be offended by this question, but he knows Ri too well by now for this.

(Even though Ri would miss him terribly, he knows the blond boy would not for an instant give up the opportunity to see his own family again.)

Even so, pride is a heady thing, almost as powerful as the thing he feels in his veins, and he will _not_ admit he feels the same.

_(Every day,_ he thinks, without pause.)

“No,” he lies, instead.

RI inhales a shaky breath, as if he is trying to avoid saying something particularly painful. “Master Ash…she knows what happened to your mom. She could tell you. You could ask her, find out.”

“No. Just drop it.”

Ri looks as if he expects this answer, but he cannot disguise the pity in his eyes.

“Alright,” he says, and leaves Fray alone, soot cool and dry on his hands.

They are taking off tonight, to the outer rim, to a system further than he has ever been. He doesn’t know when he’ll next be as close to Kalros as he is now.

The distance between here and home yawns like a chasm. His thoughts collide with questions, his heart aches with longing, and nothing is stagnant, nothing is at peace. There is no balance. There is no samsara.

His dreams are filled with voices, and he hears, he hears, he hears.


	5. Chapter 5

**\---**

**The Gift of Majesty**

**\---**

_The gray skies of Kalros are nothing compared to the iridescence of the galaxy, nothing compared to starlight, nothing compared to the wide night sky._

_I wish you could have seen them, mother._

_But, if you had, I would not have become who I was meant to be._

_\---_

Four years after they leave Kalros—four years of battles that have become increasingly bloody, four years of powers spindling between the webs of fingers and in the spaces between breaths—Ash announces that it is time to build Ri’s lightsaber.

(“How come you get a lightsaber and I don’t?” Fray asks, and he does not care if he comes across as petulant.

“Because I’m a year older than you,” Ri says with an air of superiority.

(Ten months, really is the difference. Ri has just turned seventeen.)

Fray does not see how this is relevant.

“That’s not fair,” he says.

Ash steps in smoothly with her velvety voice. _“You will find yours soon. Just a year. Just wait.”_

He is tempted to say that’s that she said last time. Just a year. And then back to home.

But he holds his tongue.)

\---

Ri spends almost a week meditating, attempting to ascertain the location of his crystal. There are several planets where saber crystals can be found, and Ri’s brow creases deeper and deeper as the week goes by.

Ash refuses to assist him—in this, she says, he must make his own path.

So on that seventh day, the blush of first light, Ri’s eyes pop open, and he stands. He finds Ash, and he gives her a look, one somber and soft-tinged, but accepting.

Ash—having gotten quite good at interpreting Ri’s expressions—only smiles. She had known all along. 

So back to Jedha—Ri’s home planet—they go. The crystals there can only be found in caves—very much like the ones Ri was abandoned in, left alone underground in a lifetime he has tried to forget.

\---

Jedha is a kind of _mecca,_ a gathering place, something sacred and treasured—like _samsara,_ like ancient belief. On their way there, Ri carries himself with a heaviness Fray does not recognize, and the ship dyes the night in cerulean starlines.

\---

Ri inhales shakily at the entrance to a rock face, the burnt-red of the ground as familiar to him as his own heart. But he steps in, anyway, because—

( _—you can call me Ri_. _I’m going to build my own lightsaber and fight bad guys and help the galaxy.)_

Fray, Ash, and Tee-eye follow. The mouth of the cliff swallows them whole.

\---

So through crystal-caves they trawl, and it is like spinning in a kaleidoscope. Fray cannot imagine how Ri will pick just one; everywhere he looks color ignites, so stellate it is near blinding. Ri’s own skin is giving off some sort of bioluminescent glow—ghostly and pale and everything is bright, bright lights.

But Ri walks as if he is navigating a path for his eyes only—lefts and rights so dizzying and lightning-quick it is all he and Ash can do to keep up with him. Then, abruptly, Ri stops.

“There,” he breathes. “Just there.” And he plucks a bright crystal from where it winks above his head—

And this is what Fray will remember, from now on, about Ri. Not the lefts and rights or the dizziness of the cave but of Ri reaching upwards, ever upwards, toward a light only he could see.

\---

Ri spends a good week building a hilt; it is a ribbed titanium curve, short and sturdy. When Ri places the crystal in he must make several adjustments that take up the space of a day, and Fray looks on with barely guarded jealousy.

When the blade flares to life—a blinding periwinkle plasma loop—Fray moves to walk away.

But soon Ash is challenging Ri to spar, smiling at him in that way she does with only her eyes, and Fray cannot miss this battle.

Periwinkle meets blinding diamond-white. Sparks shower in the sky, and they settle in the cosmos like stars.

\---

Ri is nice enough.

Fray gets a chance to try out his saber that night, skillfully flexing its arc of silvery lavender through darkened sky. It has barely any weight at all, and he watches Ri demonstrate a few forms the blade seems to extend from his arm in a fluidity like time itself.

And after training, in one of those star-dusted nights that seem to go on forever, they share a kiss, and something more. Fray is surprised by the warmth of skin that is tinged pale as snow, by the sweetness of touch, by the simplicity of companionship. He discovers something about himself that night, catalogues this memory like something precious. But it is also the kind of kiss that comes with all the foolhardiness of youth. And though Fray’s lips tingle for a week afterwards he cannot meet Ri’s eyes. Ash, annoyed and at wit’s end, tells them both to get over it, and they fall back into their old routine as easily as if it had never happened, any awkwardness dissolving into the red-moon dust at their feet.

It’s nice enough.

\---

Their ship is not a home like Kalros had been, but it, too, will do. It is cramped and homey, and despite the small bunk Fray can usually still get a decent rest. It is getting harder, though, these days. When he closes his eyes he sees pirate and traders, thieves and villagers, all with identical expressions of fear, all speared through with light like hellfire.

But his bunk is silent, tonight. Ri is already twined loftily above head, fast asleep, his breathing soft and even.

Tonight the ship does not echo with screams in the night, with last wishes, with eyes as wide as silence.

The lumpy mattress is soft, and cool, and nice enough.

\---

When Fray finally builds his own saber from a dark-dyed platinum, he places a sharp triangular crystal in the hilt. He’s spent three days in a catacomb-like tunnel, guided by the strange sense that what he was looking for was right in front of him. Finally, he dug the crystal out from underneath his feet, buried right where they had set up camp.

Hiding in plain sight.

Hidden, found.

Wet, dry.

Alive—

—and dead.

\---

The blade ignites after several long moments, springing into sharp clarity—

A frost-fur lime-green.

Lime clashes against periwinkle against diamond-white. Each blade burns hotter than the sun, than the volcano planet, than the heat of his dreams.

They spar.

They meditate.

They rest.

They repeat.

A circle.

Life, death.

Balance swings, a clanging metronome, back into place.

_Samsara._

\---

Until—

It could have been any day, any routined morning: Ash’s guiding meditation, Ri’s easygoing japes, the hum of the cruiser and Tee-eye’s whirring drives. They arrive on a silken planet in the early dawn hours—Ash has gotten a vision of a trading deal gone wrong; she wants to evacuate civilians before anyone can get hurt.

But they are too late. Firelight ignites the sky, choking out the rising sun. Bodies litter the pale ground, wreathed in smoke so thick and perfumed it is like incense in the air.

And Fray—like running into the _fray_ , no longer _Fray_ like a broken thing—ignites his saber, ready to attack. To hurt.

To kill.

His crystal flares to life.

And shines a blinding bright-red.

\---

“What the—”

And though they are in the midst of battle, he deactivates his weapon immediately. The trio stops the deal, apprehends the firestarters in a quick and stilted duel. Fray uses his fists and the force, sending his opponents into harmless unconsciousness.

There are no more casualties, today.

\---

“What was that?” Ri asks, after even the embers have finished smoldering, and their golden glow has faded from the cruiser’s cabin viewports.

Fray doesn’t answer, thought there can be no doubt as to what he is referring.

“Do it again,” Ri urges, almost urgently, though Fray can’t help but notice that he stands a wary distance away.

But Fray fingers the trigger, anyway, reckless. The buzz of plasma reverberates as it jumps to life, dyeing the walls of the ship—

A blinding yellow gold.

Fray shakes his head. Turns it off.

Reignites it.

_Buzz._

This time the evening glows a fiery crimson-orange.

_Buzz._

Deep forest green.

_Buzz._

Pale straw.

_Buzz._

His familiar frost-split lime.

He inhales shakily, but for the moment the color holds.

 _Fray,_ the voice warns, sharper than before, and more urgent, _do you hear that?_

\---

Fray spends a good week avoiding training altogether. Whenever he next ignites the saber it flares a different color—orange, yellow, gold, coral, amber, scarlet. This last one scares him the most. He knows that there exists a balance—life, death, _yes_ , he knows that instinctively—but the dark scares him anyway. It seems like a gliding, easy thing, like landslides, like sloshing banks, like rice paddies—

But he doesn’t want to face the possibility that it could live inside him, too.

\---

He manages to level out the color eventually, and he spends his nights igniting it to see the lime color spread over the walls—off and on, off and on.

But sometimes he thinks he’ll see a tint, a hint of gold or ruby that ignites his veins and quickens his pulse.

These are the nights he refuses to spar. These are the nights he can hear the whispering voices of his past.

_(Do you—)_

These are the nights he regrets.

\---

Ash, Ri, and Fray have started this practice in battle, of reaching out to one another, of tapping into each other’s’ heads, anticipating each other’s moves.

Fray has cultivated this power greedily. Even now, he can feel the lives of each person on the planet they’re settled on, each animal in the forest, each blade of phosphorescent grass.

He could reach out across the galaxy—he knows he could—and find the life force of his mother, grasp onto it, make sure she’s alright. He has learned how. He could do it.

Ash has even started teaching him a bit of her telepathy; he could drop a thought right into his mother’s unsuspecting head.

There are stars outside the viewport.

He closes his eyes. He looks away.


	6. Chapter 6

_There is a voice in my head. There is a rainbow in my weapon._

_There is a starlight in my heartbeat._

_There is an anchor in my past._

\---

Five years pass since Kalros, as if in a fragrant, flame-tipped dream. Lime and lavender, frosted-white. Painted masks and silver-blue skin.

Death, _yes_ , and life, even more so.

And dreams with voices that ask a question to which Fray has no answer.

Fray is _fray_ still, fray like a skirmish, fray like the conflict that rises, like a tide-sea, deep inside his heart.

The same conflict that sears inside his saber, unsure what it wants to be, what its power should take the shape of. It only knows that there is no going back, no time when red did not flare, deep as capillaries, from a trusted hilt.

And it is this—this notion of forward motion—that propels as much as it takes away.

So it is that one morning Fray wakes up, and as suddenly as flying—or falling—he realizes he cannot remember his own name.

He is _Fray_ , he _knows_ he is Fray, but what had he been before? What had his mother called him, back home, when she tucked him into bed at night?

Who was he before a Jedi?

Was he anything at all?

\---

His tears splay like tracks on his dust-riddled cheeks. When Ri walks in, concerned, Fray tries to voice his predicament aloud, but finds he cannot locate he words. He cannot take comfort in someone he has come to know even closer than a brother. He cannot describe that he mourns something he willfully left behind. _But,_ he thinks, as he stands, that Master Ash would understand.

(He remembers, back on Myrkr, learning about small insects and animals who played dead, pretending to be frozen and stiff in an attempt to protect their own lives. 

And perhaps his master is like this—going by a name of something dead, so that she may be spared.)

\---

He goes to her, and tells her, and they sit, silent, as he mourns his past self.

The cabin’s interior is lit by the golden warmth of sunup. Master Aashalata’s wolfish mask has little silver clasps that hook over her ears; they glint in this gold each time she turns. Her eyes now are fixated on Fray—just Fray—as she slips the clasps off and lets the mask rest on the lip of the table.

In the dim morning light, her mouth is criss-crossed in scars—skin-half-healed, silver-bright.

(She tells him in words that are most like song—still dropped like love notes into his brain—about her home world, which was never a home to her, and how she was made to be a servant-girl, an errand child. Aashalata grew up in the Kuat drive yards, forced to bruise her fingers laboring on parts to massive starships.

But Ash had not been passive, or docile, or silent. And when she had gotten older, she had developed a silver tongue, so sharp her slavers had cut it out. 

When she finally escaped six months later, there was nothing to be done.)

Light-beams glint off that silver mask with the fangs painted on, white-hot teeth and angry red lips pulled back into a perpetual snarl. It looks like a docile creature sleeping, void of purpose on the soft brown wood.

Her name, Aashalata, means ‘creeper of hope’. This is a contradiction, but she is, too: the angry scars and fanged snout contrasted with her kind, dark eyes; her thick, black, wavy hair; her proud, straight nose; her soft, brown skin.

He wishes suddenly that he could have heard her real voice. But she has overcome this, hasn’t she? She has taught herself how to speak in a manner all her own.

It is a kind of revenge, he realizes, but it is also a victory. It is a mastery of self, a mastery of the past, a thing she has overcome. And pasted over her scars is not a snarl of viciousness, but of triumph, and when she smiles it sparks in her eyes, too. She looks like a beast altogether, one who has mastery over all.

He realizes that her tormentors would never have imagined such a fate.

\---

There’s a type of plant called _nepenthes_ whose stalks grow flowers that sprout into curious, bell-shaped cups. Jungle monkeys sip rainwater from them, a kind of self-learned irrigation system. Fray imagines it like some kind of lurid tea party before he stops himself, visualizing in his mind’s eye primates sipping daintily as they slake their thirst with something precious.

But what had entranced him even more than the idea of monkeys holding tea parties under canopies, unbeknownst to the world around them, was the idea that the flowers grow these little empty spaces inside them for someone else to empty, so they could be refilled. In floods he imagines them weeping, spilling susurrating sentences he hasn’t heard in ages—

_—my cup runneth over—_

And perhaps he might be one of those flowers still, bending its neck for rainwater, and hasn’t it been too long since someone has unfilled him, has shouldered the burden that delicate photosynthetic green could not sustain?

Perhaps he has been too long untouched, like some flower untrodden on, and so he overflows.


	7. Chapter 7

_A Jedi’s power is as a peacekeeper. A Jedi’s power is as a peacekeeper. A Jedi’s power is as a—_

_How can I keep the peace when the name I’ve chosen for myself is something that was always made to be broken?_

_\---_

(When Fray is knighted, falling to one knee, the ground is star-sharp. He hadn’t noticed how much he’d aged when Ash does not lean much to place her blade—that diamond-white, so pale it is almost colorless—to touch his shoulders.

He can still feel the star-hot buzz of it above his skin.)

_It is this_ , he thinks, that is the final nail in his coffin.

It is too much power, now.

There is nowhere else to go but down.

\---

He thinks as he stands alone on the ship, with no small amount of lost love, of Ri with his gap-toothed smile, of Ash with her steel-sharp mask and thick, expressive eyebrows.

They had known who they were, who they wanted to be.

But his blade, multicolored as starlight, no longer the bucolic monochrome of his home, stutters with a voice, one he has spent too long ignoring.

He has been wandering, lost, and the mission is more clouded than it has ever been.

_(A Jedi’s power is as a peacekeeper.)_

_(“She’s a Jedi. I’m going to be one, too. I’m going to build my own lightsaber and fight bad guys and help the galaxy.”)_

_(“You’ll write, won’t you?”)_

_(Fray, do you hear—)_

_(Send me a blank letter, then. So I know you’re alright.”)_

_(Fray, fray, fray—)_

This last voice is soft as a sigh.

“I don’t know what I am,” he says, to no one and the night. “I’m not a Jedi. Not a Sith. Not anything.”

\---

Fray has not touched his saber since his knighting, imagines the colors swirling inside the careworn hilt like a maelstrom. Ri and Ash have gone on a supply run with Tee-eye, leaving him alone to stand guard. They’ve noticed his temper lately, his unease. They are _trying to help, can’t you see Fray? We are just trying to help you. Let us in._

_(A year of training, you see. Then we’ll bring you back. After that, you can decide if you want to continue on the Jedi path or not.)_

_(Then we’ll bring you back.)_

_(Then we’ll bring you back.)_

_(Then we’ll bring you back.)_

_(You’ll write, won’t you?)_

His saber’s crimson flares make quick work of the navicomp’s internal wiring, and Fray watches numbly as everything goes up in sparks.

\---

He lets the ship burn. The memories of the last seven years fade from the air in embers—bright, bright, bright. By the wreckage he leaves a single sheaf of paper—he has taken the rest of the ream with him.

The sheet is white, tinged at the corners with smoke, and totally blank.

\---

Fray tricks an attendant into lending him a rusted, battle-worn cruiser. He guns the ignition, drives until he can no longer see straight, and checks into a seedy underground motel. He sleeps for a day, traces spiraling letters on the paper some middling mornings (his o’s are still formed the same curious, counterclockwise way), and spends the rest of the time silent, staring, alone.

One morning, in the half-light of the splinter-rayed mirror, he cuts off his hair. The copper curls—reminiscent only of a life he has abandoned, of a name he has forgotten—fall to the ground.

He will no longer look at his face and recognize his mother. He will no longer see her in himself. As the last lock curls past his ear, he looks at himself, full in the face, and can no longer recognize any part of his family, or Kalros, or even the child he used to be.

_I am Fray like a tear, because I have torn myself apart, and rebuilt a new me from the ground up._

And when he does so, when his transformation is complete, what he remembers is not all the lives he had seen razed to the ground, fallen to the wayside like fish in a river.

_No_ , all he remembers is that first man, that first death on a diamond-white blade.

The first death that had not been because of him, but for him.

_I hear it_ , he admits, finally, _finally._

_I hear you._


	8. Chapter 8

_Come with me_.

\---

There are others, in the galaxy, with power like him, and so c _ome with me_ , he says, to all the lost ones he meets:

A soft-voiced, pigtailed girl who’s been blinded by acid rains;

A boy—as pale-blonde as Ri—whose nightmares haunt his waking moments, leaving perpetual bruises under his translucent eyelids;

A troubled, teenage humanoid who flinches at loud noises and quavers at the sound of lightning—too much like shells and bombs falling, breaking apart into the atmosphere;

And lastly a small slip of a child who cannot speak, found in a razed settlement inside a dormant volcano, who reminds Fray so much of Ash it makes him _ache._

“I want to teach,” Fray tells them, “You who are lost.”

The voice in his head stills.

“My lost ones,” he says, “Hear me.”

\---

Fray is not so vain as to think he will do as good a job as his former master. But still he cannot help but think that Ash had not wanted children who were broken and unwhole.

He’d been healthy, strong, well-adjusted. By contrast, these children’s screams echo in the cavernous spaces in his thoughts, their dreams unravel and unspool as messily as tidal waves. They are loud and turbulent and quiet and moody, and sometimes all of these at once. They each have different needs, different handicaps, and some days he thinks his training will do them more harm than good.

But he loves them all, anyway. Fiercely, devoutly. He will not pass them over. They have no one else.

So they open their doors, which are not red but blank, cavernous, pliable.

They let him in.

\---

Just as easily as they come to him, they fall away, like dewdrops.

The first girl _runs_ , and at first he can catch her, but she is quick, and as she grows she flies beyond his reach. She cannot learn to turn her disability into a weapon, like Ash had, she does not wish to hone her skills like a warrior should.

_(“Come here!”)_

When she runs away for good, one bitter cold morning, Fray watches her go, hunched and mourning, but he does not follow.

\---

The second child cannot escape his traumas, no matter how hard he tries. He will not eat, he will not sleep, and the bags under his eyes become deeper, deeper, his skeleton seeping out from his flesh as if it is trying to escape.

Fray tries to help as best he can—plies him with real food, not just the ration-stuff from wholesale markets—he tries again and again, _he does_ , but at a point he must admit that it was hubris that led him to believe he alone could help this boy.

And at this time it is already too late. The boy is a wisp, is a ghost.

When he passes from this life into the next, it is with nothing more than a sigh.

\---

The third child dreams of revenge, of vengeance and violence that he could inflict upon those bombs in the sky, upon those shells that blew apart his home, shattering one of his earlobes and killing his parents and sister.

When Fray tries to dissuade him, to talk him down, he becomes incomprehensibly violent.

He tears half their ship apart, attacks the other children, scores a scar on Fray’s cheek with a panel he’s ripped out using only his mind.

Fray leaves him by himself with his anger. He takes the last child with him, and they secure another transport, and they fly away. He tells himself this is the right choice.

_(Ash in his memory, gripping his wrist, so he would not be left behind.)_

He looks back, though, and the boy haunts his blinks—sour-faced, angry, alone.

\---

The fourth child will tell him nothing, will speak to no one, and Fray believes that is too late by now for her to learn how to do so. But Fray provides a bed and warm food, a kind voice, a warm presence by the fire, and an ear to listen if the child should ever wish to make use of it.

It is not enough. He is not equipped to help in the way she needs.

Still, this child is all he has left, and he treats her as if she is his own.

But the child had been born with a heart defect, something Fray wouldn’t have been able to fix even if he’d known about it.

This fourth child blinks out like a star, asleep in Fray’s lap one twilight evening, and the force gains another innocent soul too early, too soon.

In the space of the years of his since leaving home, Fray has lost everything he has ever loved.


	9. Chapter 9

**\---**

**The Seaward Road**

**\---**

_How heavy the burden I bear, how deep the wound in my heart._

_\---_

It is where sea marries sky that the man who had called himself after a broken thing now rises with the power he has taken for himself.

Three years have not been kind to Fray. Three years of bitterness, of anger, of a wildness that could not be tamed, of an ambition that had nowhere to go but down.

He holds in his hands nothingness, he holds in his heart an emptiness that he cannot assuage.

\---

Ri and Ash—specters alone, just visions and memories that haunt his insomniac days—reach this juncture, and view a man they have not seen in three years.

Fray—though they cannot be certain he calls himself this anymore—has close-cropped hair, dyed a dark red that they are not entirely sure is not blood. His eyes are wide and fathomless, his figure muscular and sallow.

And on his face, like a crude cowl—

—is red rice paste, in the hollows of his eyes, across the bridge of his nose, at the corners of his temples—one unbroken mask, and the last piece of his fall.

 _Because red is all that I see_ , he says, _when I look into their eyes—_

_It is all that you shall see when you look into mine._


	10. Chapter 10

_You’re not real you’re not real you’re not real—_

_No one ever came back for me. I left my mother and then she left me._

\---

Ri steps up to the man who used to be his friend, who slept in the bunk below him so he wouldn’t be afraid. His antennae are missing. Ash looks on, silvery and cloud-licked, her face completely bare, her scars disappeared.

Fray frowns, but—

A stream of light _tears_ through the sky, a heart-stuck splinter.

Purple meets lime-green, frost so sharp it is split and spitting. The sparks fade in color as they fly—gold and saffron, coral and scarlet.

The sea thrashes. The two do not exchange a word.

Purple meets green, over and over. The diamond sea is blue and venomous. Waves mount and crest, and all Fray can think is this—

_You reached up. Your crystal was in the heavens._

_Mine was down below_.

Ri comes in high, like Fray knew he would. High like the bunk in the cabin of the ship he turned into ash.

The blade arcs above his head. Fray counters low. There is something in his eyes when Ri looks down, a judging angel.

Purple _fades_.

Ri—

—shuts off his weapon in the middle of the battle.

And Fray cannot stop his own attack, this blow that would slice Ri in half.

He does the only thing he can. He—

Pushes Ri off the cliff, out of the way of the pulsing lime light, into the waterfall-depths below.

Fray doesn’t think twice, doesn’t think about that time he fell, nearly drowning into the bog.

( _My lost ones_ , he thinks about, in that slumber-second. _Now it is I that is truly, truly lost.)_

He jumps.

\---

He jumps, even though he has never learned how to swim.

Ri is a dark, flickering blur in sodden clothes, framed by foam-capped waves roaring in his ears, swirling in his mouth.

He catches onto Ri’s sleeve, and the two of them clutch at each other as their fingers scrabble at tree roots, at plants, at anything that can propel them onto the bank.

Water is washing everything away—the blood, the paste, the tears he sheds like warm salt. They cleanse him in a way that pierces his soul. The beach is silent, and the sky is gray like a bog he only half-remembers.

And Fray—

Breaks.

(Later, Fray will not be able to describe how they were able to do it. Everything was rush of roaring water, the bitter cold that swept into his fingertips and toes. But also, bright and warm as daylight, was Ri, grabbing his collar, clasping his hand, helping him as they lay face-up in a muddy inlet.

Their clothes had been warmed by the sun, stiff with salt.)

When Fray blinks, Ri is gone.


	11. Chapter 11

_Stay away stay away stay away._

_I will corrupt you, too._

_I will make you lost._

\---

 _No more,_ Fray realizes, as he watches the boy he had once been, and can visualize the path that had diverged, sees how horribly he has gone wrong. The phantom’s warmth shivers, spiraling away into the atmosphere.

His saber is cool in his hands. He thinks if he never sees it spark again it would be too soon.

And this is not an epiphany as epiphanies go; there is no fanfare, no celebration. Only an aching man with red clay in his eyes, red clay on his hands, red clay in his heart. There is no balance here, no _samsara_. Everything is heavy and red. Like his mask. Like his soul.

(A tsurugi is a kind of ancient, double-edged sword. He’d seen one in a holo, once, wielded by a swordsman who’d held himself with such brackish rigidity it had bordered on unearthly.

His mother had said once that his actions could also be a double edged-sword, but at the time he wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that.)

So when he sees that ship above head, he knows they have come, they have tracked him to the edge of the universe. _Of course_ she would know where he would be. She must have seen it all unfold, perhaps even from the day they met. The thought makes him immeasurably sad.

And maybe this is one of those things with double edges, a brittle-rusted blade that had once felled two enemies at once. Or perhaps it is the warrior at its helm, alien in his posture, frighteningly still.

He doesn’t know.

\---

The ramp lowers, and if this is another hazy half-dream he does not fight it. He’s had many, many of these since that first child, since that winter flight, since that shadow fell away into the stars.

So he lets himself be captured, lets himself be brought to his knees. It must be troopers, he realizes, or officers of the law, here to prosecute him for the four lives he has ruined beyond all recognition.

But there are no thick gloves on his arms, no stiff-stitched fabric at weather-worn wrists. Instead, the hands at his shoulders are warm, and kind.

He looks up.

His former master and classmate look down. They are wearing identical expressions of sadness, but in both of their eyes sparks something like relief.

Even the sight of Tee-eye warbling slowly down the ramp tears at Fray’s heartstrings.

And _oh,_ he knows they are not real, but he appreciates the effort all the same.

Ri has grown his hair a little; it curls at his shoulders. His face is pale and pointed, and he has a bit more breadth to his shoulders. His antennae bob when he walks. Ash looks almost exactly the same, but the paint on her mask shows the days it has endured, blinks more faded, more chipped. It only makes the snarl more menacing, despite the soft mouth he knows hides underneath it, and the scars that are there hiding, asleep.

And in that moment he believes he does not deserve that knowledge, does not deserve any of the intimate details he knows about the people he has betrayed.

But he cannot help his reaction to seeing them here. It seems like a lifetime away.

Even so, their bodies look so solid, their eyes so silver-sharp.

“Master Ash?” he asks, tears spangled in his eyes. “Ri?”

Could it be—?

“It’s Baghiri, actually,” the blond boy replies tersely, in a voice so familiar and missed.

“Baghiri…” he swallows, testing it out.

Astonishingly, the blond boy’s mouth quirks into a smirk. “I’m yanking your chain. Of course it’s still Ri.”

Fray’s heart settles somewhere warm in his throat. Hs sinks to his knees, then falls backwards on his heels, and eventually lands on his back, feet braced on the ground—because standing would be too much, too startlingly bright.

“I’m sorry,” he says, from where he lies sprawled on the floor.

Ri reaches a hand out, as if to haul him up. Fray is reminded suddenly of a boy at twelve doing this, at pulling away at the last second. He’d deserve it. He reaches his palm out anyway, prepared for the rejection.

Warm, callused fingers curl around his wrist. They pull him up. They help him stand.

 _I don’t deserve your forgiveness,_ he thinks, _but thank you, anyway._

\---

“When is my execution?” he asks dully, when he is ensconced in the cool steel of the ship, and its cavernous echoes spring across the velvet of hyperspace.

“Last week,” Ri says immediately. “You missed it.”

Fray blinks.

“What—”

 _“You’re not getting executed, dummy,”_ Ash says, and in her echoing voice it sounds even more ridiculous.

Astonishingly, he finds himself grinning. “What does that mean?” he asks.

Ash blinks once, slowly.

“Master?” Fray prompts again after a few moments of silence.

 _“You broke your vows. We’re giving you a penance,” s_ he replies idly.

“I see,” Fray says, head bowed. This surprises him. He did not anticipate mercy. “What does that entail?” he asks.

His former master pauses for a hair’s breadth. Then she sighs, a sound that, in his mind, is like the wind blowing through hollow trees. “ _We’re…sending you back to your home world. Exile, for the remainder of your days. It’s what you deserve.”_

His eyes widen. He hadn’t expected that at all. “I’m going back to Myrkr?”

_“Yes.”_

And then he says the words he has avoided for the past ten years. “My mother…?”

 _“Yes,”_ She says, and he can see the emotion in her eyes. _“Your mother survived.”_

This hits him like a blow, like something forcing the breath from his chest. Tears are shocked from his eyes. And yet it seems almost too kind.

“That’s not a penance,” he says instead.

Ash pauses. _“There is another piece to you atoning.”_

“What is it?”

_“You’ll know when you get there.”_

“Secretive to the end, Master?” he cannot help but quirk up his lip wryly.

Despite her mask he knows she is replying in kind. _“This is not a secret. It is justice.”_

He frowns, shakes his head. “Why are you showing me mercy? You of all people should know that I am the least deserving of it.”

The look Ash gives him is like sorrow, like a silver arrow plunging through his lungs. She sighs, a faraway look on her face. Then she says:

_“There will be a man who learns to walk amongst the stars. I know this because I have foreseen it. He will hold power in his right hand and his past in his left, and he will lose everything he has ever loved. His family will suffer for three generations, and his lineage will be buried deep, forgotten under swirling sands.”_

Tears glitter Ash’s night-dark eyes.

 _“That man’s fate is sealed,”_ she says. _“But I will see to it that yours is not.”_

Fray is quiet for a long moment. “Thank you, Master,” he says finally, because he can recognize when he has been given a gift. But then he realizes that there is another piece to gratitude.

“I am sorry,” he starts, the words unfamiliar but welcome on his tongue. “For what it’s worth. I want to do good, share what I’ve learned.”

A pause. Then he pulls something from his bag. “Look, I’ve even started to recount my training, so others can avoid the mistakes I’ve made.”

The start of textbooks, pages written neatly, describe things he’s seen and observed, skills he’s picked up, writings he’s translated.

The cover of the first gleams brightly, like light in a shadow, like a circle, like _samsara_ :

_The Teachings of the Force._

Ash smiles.

\---

Ash comes to him that night, on that soft bunk that reminds him of the first ship, and she sits, dipping the mattress with a sigh. Her mask is gone again, and her mouth is soft and scarred and red.

“ _I’m sorry,”_ she says after a moment, soft and resonant. _“I should have known. I thought knighting would have helped, given you responsibility.”_

Fray sighs. “I couldn’t resist it. I tried to.”

He looks at his hands.

“But I couldn’t.”

_“There’s more to it than that.”_

Fray weeps. “They needed my help,” he says wetly. “I could hear them, calling to me. But I failed them all.”

And he thinks, suddenly, that Ash must have heard him calling out to her, too. But this reminds him too much of that first man. He recognizes himself in the men he has fought, he recognizes himself in the scars on Ash’s mouth, in the haunted look of Ri’s eyes in the dark.

He recognizes himself where those he loves have been tormented, and suddenly sees himself as the tormentor.

Ash sits, silent, beside him—a master and her fallen apprentice.

\---

Later that night, Ri and Ash look on as the harsh man settles himself in that bottom bunk, curling himself in like the letter _o_ , like the ones he always started counterclockwise. In his empty arms is the shape of a space a furry creature could crawl into.

Ri smiles, soft as a blush. It is sadder than rainfall, too deep a well to be pity. It is something close to love, but not quite. This is far more fathomless.

“I want to tell him,” he says to his master.

 _“You can’t,”_ she says in reply.

A huff of air, light as a feather. “I know.” He thinks for a moment. “You knew, didn’t you? About what he would do. You had the visions. That’s why you didn’t want me to tell him about the ysalamiri, all those years ago. You saw his fate.”

Her silence confirms as much.

“Could we have stopped this from happening? Did you see everything, did you know that it would end up this way?”

She pauses before answering. _“I do not believe in every vision. In fact I have ignored many about myself. They exist solely as possibilities. Different universes. They are not set in stone. But yes, this was one of the futures I foresaw.”_

“And you still took a chance on him? You still let him go?”

_“How could I not? I took a chance on you, too.”_

Ri wipes his eye. “I don’t know if he deserves this. This exile.”

 _“It is as much a kindness as an exile_ ,” she admits to him, in that reverberating voice that has been his constant companion for the last decade-and-a-half. _“We are giving him the chance to see his family again.”_

“I know,” Ri inhales shakily. “But we’re his family, too.”

\---

Fray remembers a trip like this, ten years prior. His first trip off-planet. Now, the three of them are ten years older, though it feels like a hundred, and they are going back. His last trip. _Exile, for life_ , they said.

Never again would he see the glimmer of other moons, of other planets, of desert or ice or comet-fall.

Finally, the seafoam of Myrkr emerges from the viewport. From the distance it does not look like prison, or punishment. It looks like a long drink of water after a decade of thirst. It looks like a bed, after ten years of unrest.


	12. Chapter 12

_Home._

_\---_

Kalros has been rebuilt after the attack, nearly identical to how it had been before. He finds the solemn cottage straddling the rice paddy, the rust-brown of the earth, the deep green of the rice fields and leaves, the gray rain-riddled sky. It is always raining— _always, always, always_ —how could he have forgotten? It washes away any remnants of the paint on his face, the blood, the soot, the sweat. The color in his hair.

It feels like a baptism. It feels like rebirth.

A figure stands alone in front of the house, startled out of work by the whine of engines. It stands alone, solemn and silent, in front of the storm-door.

Fray leaves Master Ash and her apprentice, the other part of his family, behind. But first he looks back, he will _always, always,_ _always_ , remember to look back.

He waves goodbye.

He turns around.

And there, wearing the face of his family but the lines of someone more steadfastly ancient, his mother stands. Holds out an arm.

The other hand she clutches close to her heart. Fray steps up to her, and he can tell that she barely recognizes her own son. His mother takes in his close-cropped hair, the stubble where once she has kissed the smooth peach ripeness of a child’s sweaty cheek.

“It’s been ten years,” she rasps, and the sound is such that it could be a knife, so piercing and sharp-sweet. “I thought you were gone for good. Where have you been?”

He wants to say he’s sorry. He wants to say he understands why he’s been brought back.

But seeing his mother—ten years older yet no richer, yet no more fortunate—makes him change his mind halfway through. Ten years have not crushed every last bit of hubris yet left inside his heart.

“I’ve come to save you from all this,” he says. “I’ve gotten power mother, I have all sorts of power. Look!”

And so he walks inside—

_(wooden walls, pomegranate tea, a bowl of rice, still steaming-warm—)_

—and waves a hand at the table, clearly intending to levitate the contents. He expects to feel the rush of power course through him, familiar to him as the inside of his own mind.

But the ceramic stands as sentinel as it ever had.

He frowns, startled. “I don’t _understand_ —”

“My son…” his mother is saying, soft and sweet and familiar.

“Look!” he cuts across her, trying again.

But nothing moves. Not even a slight tremble of chipped china on the careworn, brassy wood.

“It’s got to be—”

“I have…”

“Some sort of trick—”

“I missed you…”

“Wait—”

“I waited for you…”

“Wait!”

He breathes heavily through his nose, thinking. Then it comes to him.

 _The saber._ Of course. Its flame tip flares, unearthly—a sour-sharp lime green. He told himself he would not call upon it again. But he has to prove to her, he has to show her. He tells himself he does not care what color it comes out to be. A press of fingers. He’s done this a thousand times before.

It does not ignite.

\---

His mother’s voice is a sighing lullaby, “My son…I’m sorry…”  
  
“I don’t—” he croaks, distraught.  
  
“I’m so sorry…”  
  
“— _understand_ —”  
  
“Please…”  
  
“I don’t—”  
  
“You’re home.”  
  
_“Understand.”_ This last word is more liquid than sound. He kneels, because he does not see how his legs can continue to support his weight. In this moment he is reminded viscerally of his knighting. He remembers his vows, and his promise of sacrifice.

Which is how he knows that _this_ is the sacrifice. _This_ is his penance. For ten years he has been overtaken by power, so much it had nearly consumed him.

He must forsake it, he understands.

But it is the hardest thing he has ever done.

He sobs even harder, clutches his fingers to his mother’s skirts. They smell like linen. They smell like home.

He settles his head on her stomach, the home he had left behind, the only place where he has ever felt safe.

Then she whispers his true name in his ear, and he remembers a lifetime he has never had, one where he had grown up and not fallen, where he had risen instead. It is a waterfall of possibilities, like visions Ash has told him about, and it is too much, all at once.

 _I hear you_ , he thinks, _but I will not let you control me._

He blinks the images, along with his tears, and they both slide down his cheeks, away.

\---

He pours the tea over the now cooled rice and eats it, like he had remembered doing in childhood. Each mouthful tastes like fading flowers, like overripe fruit.

( _Will we be home by dinner?)_

He does not let a single drop go to waste.

\---

At night, he writes. At night, he remembers:

Every moment he has ever observed, every feeling, every sight. Each memory he wants to preserve like resined flowers, before they slip away on a dream.

He is sitting now at an antique desk. A calligraphy pen and a little pot of ink are perched at his elbow. With smooth, even strokes, he starts to recount.

And quietly, from around the sleeve of his shirt, a pebbled foot sneaks around, dyed orange-bright. One olive-shined eye blinks sideways, across slick pupils.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I started this story thinking about what would happen if a boy grew up with a pet ysalamiri, and didn’t know that it was suppressing his unusually strong force powers.  
> Then the story got away from me and became an idea for my own trilogy.  
> Below are some notes/research that help better explain some of my choices:  
> The timeline of this story takes place long time before the events of the prequel trilogy, hence the writing of the Jedi texts.  
> Myrkr, Fray’s home planet, is a real planet in canon, and is where ysalamiri can be found. The farming town Kalros, however, is entirely fictional.  
> I also took some creative liberty with the ysalamiri, because they are canonically always attached to trees and cannot walk around untethered.  
> Jedha, where Ri is from, is one of the planets where saber crystals can be found.  
> Kuat, Master Aashalata’s home planet, houses the Kuat drive yards, where star destroyers are manufactured. I took creative liberty regarding the use of child labor.  
> Aashalata does mean ‘creeper of hope’ in Hindi.  
> TI-84’s name is a joke. I had a TI-84+ calculator in high school. :)  
> I purposely left Fray’s birth name ambiguous. I think it’s important to show characters that are significant because of who they are, not a name that defines them.  
> The ending:  
> I’ve had a real issue with western media lately enforcing the idea that sacrifice = death.  
> Most times I’ve found that this is not enough to make up for any perpetuated crimes. Death does not redemption make, and this mistaken tendency goes against the very core of myth. A hero (or antihero for that matter) can achieve a satisfying arc without dying.  
> Fray is supposed to be narcissistic and unlikeable at the beginning; I was inspired by Where the Wild Things Are, in showing his anger and developing this as an emotion that is all encompassing, as well as illustrating the pitfalls of hubris and the dangers of power-lust.  
> I also wanted to show at the end the unwavering love of a mother; just as Max in Where the Wild Things Are has dinner waiting for him, Fray’s mother has made him a meal as well. This idea is also mimicked in the story of the Prodigal Son, or The Prince of Egypt, which were also sources of inspiration.  
> Other inspiration include: Pinocchio (whose journey starts with a lie) and the Odyssey (which depicts Odysseus’s bloody, two decade-long journey back home.)  
> The pomegranate tea is for all you Hades and Persephone lovers, as it is meant to represent a doorway between worlds—access to the force and no access.  
> Finally, I took inspiration from Peter Pan (lost ones are like lost boys.) This also plays on idea of Fray as a perpetual child, aging but existing in this cycle like the aforementioned Max, where he once again is back at the beginning with his mother in an ending that is hopefully satisfying but also penitent—he cannot access the force ever again.  
> Therefore, it is sacrifice in that Fray will be cut off from the force, but he atones by passing on his knowledge with the texts.  
> I also wanted to stress the hubris of the Jedi in general, of their belief that they were always doing things for the greater good. Fray might have been better off if they had never found him at all. Or he might not have. There are endless possibilities.  
> (Also, shout out if you caught that blink-and-you-miss-it reference to our favorite Skywalker boys )  
> Finally, a character can deserve to carry out a penance and end up back where they started, (as Fray does—right back on Kalros, where he began his journey, without the force), but can move forward by writing the Jedi texts, connecting to the overarching story and expanding on the themes of hope, and that people live on in others. It also aligns with the idea of reunion, that love is always something to return to.  
> If you’re interested, check out some moodboards I put together for [ Fray,](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YGpzQ3kfRQQGWizGQhY9FlVBREoVPCo8) [ Ri, ](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1SgsKuGP7HjHJ0cd5eQe8eBJpJ4bA1ZPl)and [ Ash ](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JHXo1XqB4WVjhOkj_LqrnmFN51giGVMZ)  
> If you liked this, or have any questions, please leave a comment and let me know! <3


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